Peter and Lord

T. Zachary Cotler took our poetry editors on a nice little walk through history and theology. Why don't you join us?

By: T. Zachary Cotler

Wind in thecanyon an annularsound: I stand ona horse-sized stone:hasn’t movedsince it broke from the ledge 400, 000 years ago... legend ofPeter and Lord and the horseshoeup- drifting to the mental surface:

Lord sees a bent iron Uin the road andpick thatuphe tells apostle Peter, who thinks itnot worth it, so Lord picks itup,and they come to a village, and proto-capitalist Lordsells U to a smith for a single base coinand buys from an orchardmanhandfuls of cherries,and onward, drops cherries from timeto time in the road, and soPeter picksupthese unforbiddens without beingasked... I thinkabout this, crushingupwith my shoe,against the visceralcanyon’s hippolith,cherry-sized, fork-stemmedseedpods,then I go onupthe canyon,trying toimagine a benevolentworld government.

Theodore Zachary Cotler is the author of a novel, Ghost at the Loom (MP, 2014), a critical monograph, Elegies for Humanism (Rare Bird, 2015), and three books of poetry, House with a Dark Sky Roof (Salt, 2011), Sonnets to the Humans (Ahsahta, 2013), and Supplice (Center for Literary Publishing, 2014). His awards include the Colorado Prize, the Sawtooth Pri ze, the Amy Clampitt Residency, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He is a founding editor at www.winteranthology.com, which recently gave birth to The Winter Film Company, where production has begun on a feature film about poets and poetry, co-directed by Cotler and filmmaker/novelist Magdalena Zyzak.

Q:This poem has a beautiful and seemingly simplistic style which builds on a biblical myth to draw attention to our current living situations. What led you to select religious characters for this poem? Do you feel that choice created an inherent juxtaposition with our current normality?

A:Thanks. It's hard to be a literary critic of one's own work, always a little impoverishing. I truly don't know/remember what led me to it, and even to say that sounds a bit ponderous, so better to just think it and not confess it. No? If you must have a statement, could it be no more than this:I wrote on long walks at that time and had been reading Goethe then, so some themes from his poems and some phenomena in the canyon got tumbled with my particular politics/aesthetics, and then, after most of the politics boiled off, this was left. I prefer no statement at all, but I don't want to be difficult.